Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5, Arduino, and More
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Raspberry Pi 5 magazine specials: The MagPi #134 and HackSpace #71
The MagPi and HackSpace magazines both have brand-new special Raspberry Pi 5 issues out right now. Subscribers to either magazine get Priority Boarding to have their Raspberry Pi 5 orders shipped right at the front of the queue. New subscribers are eligible for Priority Boarding too, so if you’ve been on the fence about taking out a subscription, now might be the time.
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The Douzieme gauge
In this post I'm going to explain what a Douzieme gauge is, show you how I made one myself, and propose some alternative designs for higher precision.
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Tiny DIY Roomba cleans desks and countertops
The future we were promised was supposed to include robot maids and flying cars. The future we got has Roomba vacuums and Southwest Airlines. But at least those Roomba vacuum robots work pretty well for keeping floors slightly cleaner. Sadly, they leave elevated surfaces untouched and dust-ridden. To address that limitation, Jared Dilley built this tiny DIY Roomba to clean his desk.
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Love Hultén Is the Willy Wonka of Weird Synthesizers
Like so many kids growing up in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Love Hultén spent untold hours at the arcade, pumping change into boxy, blinking monoliths. Now 39, the audiovisual artist and woodworker based in Gothenburg, Sweden considers those early years of joyous button mashing as a clear origin point for his whimsical, eye-catching custom synths and consoles. “I was raised by arcade games,” Hultén says over email.
Hultén has spent the past 12 years merging hand-hewn carpentry and MIDI interfaces. The effect is surreal yet familiar, and his designs somehow feel born of both childlike nostalgia and precise engineering—Lego meets Le Corbusier. “Nostalgia is involved to a certain extent, but it’s not looking backwards,” Hultén assures me. “It’s taking steps in different directions simultaneously by using fragments from both the past and today, creating unique and balanced objects. I’ve always been into retrofuturism and sci-fi from the ’50s and ’60s.” He is especially interested in subverting how we operate machines—why rotate a knob, his work asks, when you can twist a fake eyeball instead?
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Creating a drone prototype? How one overlooked tool could accelerate speed to market
Prototyping, by nature, also means being able to make design modifications, and produce new versions that actually work, fast and cost efficiently. Advanced in-house manufacturing tools can offer solutions to these hurdles during this critical phase, driving efficiency and success.
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Request for Sensors
At Useful Sensors we’re focused on building intelligent sensors, ones that use machine learning to take raw data and turn it into actionable insights. Sometimes I run across problems in my own life that don’t need advanced algorithms or AI to solve, but are blocked by hardware limitations. A classic one is “Did I leave my garage door open?”. A few months ago I even had to post to our street’s mailing list to ask someone to check it while I was away, since I was anxious I’d left it open. Thankfully several of my great neighbors jumped in and confirmed it was closed, but relying on their patience isn’t a long term or scalable solution.